The World of Sporcle.com

Who doesn't need a "Mentally Stimulating Diversion" from time to time?  One of my officemates introduced me to a website called Sporcle.  This sticky site hosts thousands of trivia quizzes of the form, "How many X can you name in Y minutes?"  Varied and random topics range from history to geography, movies to sports, and world scrambles to crytograms.  Even math trivia topics such as Digits of Pi and A in Math! 

I recently took the Mathematician Names trivia quiz (along with hundreds of others!).  This trivia quiz lists 50 well known mathematicians by last name and gives you eight minutes to enter their first names.  While most of the mathematicians' last names looked familiar, I can't claim I was on first name basis with any of them.  This trivia quiz was a struggle for me despite my background.  I managed to cough out a measly 20/50 first names which surprisingly placed me into the 95th percentile!  But more importantly, I learned something.  Thank you Lejeune Dirichlet, Pafnuty Chebyshev and Gottfried Leibniz!

Sporcle.com is a great site if you are training to be on Jeopardy or for a Spelling Bee, need a short break or just looking for a friendly competition between friends.  New trivia quizzes are added to the lot on a daily basis.  You can also upload your own user-generated trivia quizzes.  Have fun, but keep an eye on the timer... and the clock!

IBM's Watson Wins on Jeopardy!

The three-day competition against contestants Watson, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy! was all the buzz this week. While Ken and Brad are familiar human Jeopardy! mega-champions, Watson is a supercomputer with 16 terabytes of memory, designed to compete on the quizshow as part of IBM's Greatest Challenge.  By earning $77,147 in total earnings, more that the the combined score of Jennings ($24,000) and Rutter ($21,600), Watson won $1M to which will be donated to charity Vision Source.

I was fortunate to meet Dr. Bill Murdock, a member of the DeepQA research team in IBM's Watson Research Center, at an Emory Computer Science Colloquium yesterday.  Bill Murdock helped Watson distinguish correct answers from wrong answers by building components that apply logic, learning, and analogy to the results of natural language processing.  He worked on this IBM Greatest Challenge since the project initiated in 2006 and developed many of the DeepQA components used in the Watson question answering system, particularly in the areas of typing answers and evaluating evidence from passages.

Although Watson's answers were sometimes not relevant and far from correct (think:  Toronto as a US city), more often then not, he answered with speed and confidence.  However, the answers he searched for were all facts known by some human on this Earth.  What if we could program a computer to think and create new ideas?   Will Watson's offspring prove century old conjectures on Mathematics?  What do you propose to be the next IBM Greatest Challenge? 

Congratulations, Watson!!

Mathematics of the Heart

With Valentine's Day approaching, why not discuss mathematics of the heart?  I am not talking about our sentimental deep love and understanding of mathematics.  I'm talking about the cardiovascular mathematics research led by Dr. Alessandro Veneziani at Emory University.  His research has been applied in medical practice to simulate the human heart during surgeries.  See video below to learn more about this amazing, life-saving application of mathematics:



For more information see Emory's eScienceCommons blog post or contact Dr. Veneziani directly.  Happy Valentine's Day! ♥♥♥

My Triangle by James Blunt

It is often the case that successful children's television programs cater to children and  parents alike.  This was confirmed when I recently watched a parody of James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" on Sesame Street with my best friend's one year-old daughter.  Turns out, brilliant television programs cater to children, parents AND mathematics enthusiasts.  See video and lyrics below and don't be shy to sing along!

  

This shape was brilliant.
This shape was brilliant.
This shape was pure.
I saw three angles,
of that I'm sure.

And I saw three pointed corners,
And then I saw three straight sides.
The top was very narrow and
The base was oh so wide.

A triangle.
My triangle.
Oh triangle, it's true.
I saw your shape in a crowded place.
Now I don't know what to do,
'cause you're gone and I'm so blue.

I searched low and high
Over earth and sky
But I can't find your triangle.
Tell me why.

And I miss your base,
And I miss your height,
And my dreams are triangular
Every night.

My triangle.
My triangle.
So beautiful, it's true.
It must be those angles
Put a smile on your face
Not to mention the hypotonuse.

But I need to know the truth.
Oh triangle, where are you?